‘An art museum for the 21st century’: the new David Geffen Galleries at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Twenty years ago, Michael Govan was appointed director and CEO of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). Shortly afterwards, he made a phone call that would transform the institution for good. It was to the Swiss architect, Peter Zumthor, whose magnificent new building showing LACMA’s permanent collection opens to the public on 4 May 2026.

Still at LACMA today, Govan says that his aim has been to ‘create an art museum for the 21st century’.

Known as the David Geffen Galleries, the new building boasts 110,000 square feet of gallery space, and cost $724 million to construct. It replaces LACMA’S three original buildings, designed by local architect William Pereira for the museum’s opening in 1965, and a fourth building added to the complex by Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates two decades later.

Occupying a single level, the new structure is raised 30 feet above ground, bridging the thoroughfare Wilshire Boulevard. Thanks to wraparound floor-to-ceiling windows, visitors will enjoy not just artworks, but impressive views of the city of Los Angeles.

LACMA is the most comprehensive art museum in the western United States, with a collection of more than 150,000 objects. It features works made across the globe over the past six millennia, visitor favourites including Georges de La Tour’s painting The Magdalen with the Smoking Flame (circa 1635-37) and Henri Matisse’s huge ceramic wall tile La Gerbe (1953).

Roughly 2,000 works are on view in the new building, which has been open to LACMA members since 19 April 2026. Before that date, Christie’s underwrote a series of preview visits for collectors and VIPs, as part of a trio of events called the David Geffen Galleries First Look.

The initial event had taken place in June 2025, when guests enjoyed a performance commissioned from jazz composer Kamasi Washington, featuring musicians spread throughout the building (which then had no art on display).

The building takes its name from the entertainment magnate and philanthropist David Geffen, who donated $150 million towards its construction. Perhaps the most radical feature of the new LACMA is the unorthodox way in which the collection is presented. ‘It has a whole fresh look at art history,’ Govan says.

Unlike in a traditional museum, works are not arranged by chronology, country or medium. The one-floor layout is intended to erase any sense of hierarchy. ‘The narrative is open,’ says Govan, ‘with no clear front or back, and no prescribed journey within the space.’ The building’s shape is one of organic curves rather than straight lines, and visitors enter from street level via a choice of staircases and elevators on either side of Wilshire Boulevard.

The debut presentation takes the world’s major bodies of water as its organising principle, telling multiple stories and making various connections in the context of the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific Oceans, as well as the Mediterranean Sea. It is the result of a collaboration between 45 curators with different specialisms. Works include Indonesian batik textiles, Spanish Baroque paintings, and figurative ceramics from coastal Peru.

As part of an ambitious programme of expansion and renewal, two other buildings have opened at LACMA during Govan’s directorship, both of them designed by the Italian architect Renzo Piano: the Broad Contemporary Art Museum (BCAM) in 2008, and the Lynda and Stewart Resnick Exhibition Pavilion in 2010. Though smaller than Zumthor’s building, these spaces enabled LACMA to continue to present exhibitions and other events for the half-dozen years it was under construction.

The museum was originally located on the north side of Wilshire Boulevard; the David Geffen Galleries touch down on the south side on an area of land previously used as a car park.

The elevated design means that 3.5 acres of outdoor space has been freed up at ground level, much of it shaded by the building above. This will be used to stage concerts and other public events, as well as to display art installations, including works by Mariana Castillo Deball, Diana Thater and Jeff Koons — whose monumental sculpture Split-Rocker (2000), made from thousands of flowering plants, was recently acquired by LACMA.

The fundraising campaign for the David Geffen Galleries lasted several years, and was launched with a $50 million donation from Elaine Wynn, co-chair of the museum’s board of trustees. The north wing of the new building will duly be named after the entrepreneur, art collector and philanthropist, who died in April 2025.

A selection of the artworks she owned was offered at Christie’s in New York in Elaine: The Collection of Elaine Wynn, a highlight of the 20th and 21st Century Art auctions in November 2025. (Not included there was Francis Bacon’s 1969 triptych Three Studies of Lucian Freud, which Wynn bequeathed to LACMA.)

Towards the end of her life, Wynn also helped establish the Las Vegas Museum of Art (LVMA). Scheduled to open in 2029, this will be the first major art museum in Las Vegas, the city she called home for much of her life. With Govan’s collaboration, Wynn set up a partnership with LACMA, which will allow LVMA to draw on that institution’s expertise and programmes, and to borrow from its holdings.

Govan has long been a proponent of showing LACMA’s art collection in satellite spaces beyond the museum complex. This decentralising mission is well under way already within Los Angeles County, the Charles White Elementary School Gallery being one such outpost, and California State University, Dominguez Hills, another.

The opening of the David Geffen Galleries comes at an interesting moment for the city of Los Angeles, one that will confirm its status as a premier cultural destination. Alongside LACMA, a host of other museums are set for openings or extensions.

This year will see the inauguration, for example, of both Dataland (brainchild of Refik Anadol, dedicated to art made with AI) and the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art (a venue devoted to visual storytelling, co-founded by Star Wars creator George Lucas). The Broad, meanwhile, is currently undergoing a major expansion, set for completion in 2028 — ahead of that summer’s Olympic Games, which are being held in Los Angeles.

In the specific case of LACMA, the opening of Zumthor’s building marks the culmination of one of the most ambitious cultural projects in US history — a project described by Govan as ‘an awesome responsibility… lasting 20 years’.

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